Similar to many other games and pastimes, it’s not entirely certain what the origins of bingo actually are. Of course, we can trace back the extremely popular current game of online bingo back to the birth of the internet, and then subsequently its rise in popularity since about 1995 onwards.

It’s quite difficult to work out where the real life game actually came from, though, so this is a possible history of bingo that is non-controversial and is generally accepted as being true. We start in Italy in the 16th century, with a game called “Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia”, which was a type of lottery.

This game developed throughout Europe, and evolved in France to make use of the type of playing cards we’re familiar with in modern bingo. It was the Germans who took this a stage further and even used the game for teaching purposes – presumably to teach people about counting and numbers.

In 1920s America, the game of “beano” was played at travelling fairs and carnivals. This was very similar to the European game of bingo, but obtained its name from the fact that beans were used for calling the numbers. On winning, one player is thought to have given the game its new name by shouting out “bingo” instead of “beano”.

Looking back to England in the 16th century, there was a popular game being played that was quite like the one already mentioned in Italy. Large numbers of people are known to have played various types of lottery games in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though these were illegal at this time.

The reason for these games’ illegality is that the state had its own form of a lottery game that it was promoting, which was used as a means of raising money outside of taxation. In the early 1990s, the UK brought this system back into place, with the introduction of what is now the UK National Lottery.

The early 1900s game of housey housey is one that is an obvious forerunner to today’s bingo. An outside observer, however, may imagine that bingo appeared in Britain as late as the 1960s, which is the so-called “golden age” of bingo, prompted by various changes and amendments to the law which allowed the major bingo hall chains to flourish.

Which leads us to the form bingo most often takes now, the online version. It may seem surprising to some that online bingo is such a popular pastime, but its combination of chance and the possibility of winning large sums has led to its being played by millions of people around the world.

Jon Jackson is a bingo specialist, with many years experience of operating internet UK bingo websites.